Birds Of A Feather: DotEmu Beta

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Hmm. Looks like Good Old Games has a competitor in the old-classics/no-DRM/low-price market. DotEmu is basically an old-classic/no-DRM/low-price online retailer who has just gone into open Beta. Currently it’s got a limited range, which leans Francophile with the most obvious deals being the Alec-lovedGobliiins Trilogy for 4.90 Euros and the 16-game Silmarils collection. As an encouragement to sign up, during this beta period, people who do so will apparently be able to download Ishar I, Nicky Boom 1, Metal Mutant and Transartica for free. I say “apparently” because at the time of writing, of the four, I can only find a free download link for Ishar I. Though there is the (freeware) Beneath a Steel Sky and – I have no idea – Draskula. Oh – and some webgames, which just lead me to wasting 10 minutes playing Street Fighter 2 CE. ME BLANKA! STRONG! NO FEAR THIGHS OF CHUN-LI. YOU LOOK LIKE A RUGBY PLAYER, LADY.

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Drascula was the first adventure game from a spanish developer called Alcachofa Soft – people which I actually know, and who were responsible for the Mortadelo y Filemon games – and a game I actually haven’t tested.

I LOVE Nicky Boom. It has one of the better Adlib soundtracks in a videogame, and has a very unique style.

The only Silmarils game I ever bought was Storm Master on the Amiga. It was an odd blend of strategy with a reasonable duck shoot style arcade game thrown in the mix. What really appealed to me at the time was its rather unique looking fantasy setting.

Transarctica! How dearly I loved that game! Must look into getting that again. Then again, sometimes it is best not to look too closely at things that nostalgia would have one believe were great. Point in case, turns out the first Monkey Island was actually shit.

Turns out the first monkey island was actually shit? I mean, you have a game that is actually perfectly written, which is erudite and fun in its references, which flows greatly and whose puzzles are perfectly explained and coherent, and that is shit?

I’ve been an AG fan for like 20 years, but somehow missed the original Monkey Island. So when the new fancified version was on sale I bought it. I played for like an hour and I haven’t gone back. I can’t remember more than a mild chuckle at the jokes. I really don’t think the game holds up well. I’m sure I couldn’t play through a Space Quest game now either and I loved those.

I am really enjoying Oucast right now, though. So, it’s not just the matter of the game being old. Maybe I would have like Monkey Island more as a teen. I remember playing, and mostly liking, one of the sequals a few years ago.

Anyway, there’s just something about the game that doesn’t work for me anymore, so I don’t think Mr. Fancy Hat above is way off base here. He would be if he dissed Super Mario 3 though.

But Monkey Island is not about the jokes! It’s well written in the same fashion “Singin’ in the rain” is well written. Indeed I consider it the Star Wars of videogames: a game made of nostalgia, an homage to old adventure books with just the right ammount of anachronisms to make the pop culture references funny. It has a very well constructed pirate world, the character reactions make sense, the sense of everything being at the right and logical narrative place is always present. Something that, sorry, does not happen with Outcast, which is much worse written and whose characters are much poorer than a seller that just with one word and some pixels is described entirely. It’s a masterpiece of maximalism, of doing so much with so little. It does not need to be funny, because the sword fight mechanism is indeed a brilliant parody and a brilliant puzzle, or because the graphic style fits so well to the world it describes.

@Risingson: I don’t think Outcast is better/worse than Monkey Island, but I had never played either. Monkey Island felt tedious, while Outcast drew me in. Everything about the interface just slows everything down to much. Monkey Island is just too bogged down with adventure game problems like pixel hunts.

When I said, “joke,” I included the whole feel of the game not just the one-liners. I get what you are talking about, but I’d have to force myself to play the game to experience it. I guess that’s my point. There’s great stuff there, but I’m too lazy and easily distracted by shiny and new to experience it.

I do agree that the writing isn’t great in Outcast, but the world is interesting.

I guess competition is good, but i must confess I do have a certain fondness for GOG, mainly because they’re nice guys. Or they were until most of their staff were massacred by a raging koala last week.
You don’t get stuff like that happening on stuffy old dotEMU I bet!

@Risingson: Come on, that’s a bit of hyperbole, no? Sorry, but I can’t think of any game that can be compared to Dostoyevsky or Tolstoi. Not even close. I guess you could say that Monkey Island is to Games as Tolstoi is to Novels, but I think that’s quite a stretch too.

I didn’t want to say that Monkey Island is a bad game, but that it is now a bit inaccessible because of ye olden mechanics involved. It is quite possible for a proper right-thinking gamer to pick up Monkey Island and come away with the opinion that it is not good because they didn’t enjoy it.

The problem with point&click games is that there is always one exact solution, and often, it barely makes sense (at least to me). The only point&click game I’ve played recently where I didn’t have to use a walkthrough all the time was The Longest Journey (although admittedly, Monkey Island was similar in that the puzzles made sense). However, I also needed a walkthrough for some of God of War’s puzzles (and I hate FFX for the temple sections), so I think my brain is different from most people’s.
Give me a puzzle in the real world any time, but video games can’t sync to my thinking. Or something.

The only time I needed a walkthrough was the thing with the rubber ducky. That was just an impossible puzzle.
Believe me, it weirds me out just as much you that I couldn’t solve easier puzzles (God of War…) than some of the crap presented in TLJ.
Edit: I also didn’t say that TLJ is a great example for puzzle design, it most certainly isn’t. It’s just that I have the problem with nearly every point&click that the puzzles don’t make sense to me, so I don’t play them.

They need to not put their site through online translation software. Another choice excerpt:

“A unique compilation of 16 Silmarils games which will bring you to other worlds.The psychological dimension of most of these games will make you fully experience adventures and, for a while, you will really think that you literally are in the game.”

So as I understand it, this Silmarils game pack is some sort of strong hallucinogenic drug.

Simple answer: Dot Emu are the company that packaged the games for GoG. They’ve actually always been for sale directly through the Dot Emu site itself, but now they’ve launched a proper account based thingamyjig to sell them through.

As far as I know, the PC version of SSF4 will release about the same time the Arcade machines come into stores. That should be around September.

The reason is pretty simple, Arcades run a WinXP based OS and SF4 on top of that. Originally, there were no Arcade machines planned for SSF4, but fan reaction convinced them otherwise. So it’s super easy for them to release the PC version once they got the Arcades ready.

Transarctica was one of those unreachable games for me as a kid… looked mind-bendingly awesome to my pre-teen brain, along with life or death and that frigging willy beamish game… testament to the feats of extrapolation you’re capable of as a wean – all I had to go on was the name, concept and a picture of a very swarthy gentleman in a furry hat. Then back to wizball.

My reading of the wording on the site (“During 10 days, before the official opening, you’ll get the opportunity to download many games such as Ishar I, Transarctica, Metal Mutant and others for free.”), is that the free games will change over the course of the ten days…

DotEmu is listed on Wikipedia as one of the companies signed up as a GOG supplier, so I’m guessing (also based on the similarity of their websites) that DotEmu is a publisher/distributer of some sort and is in partnership with GOG rather than being a direct competitor.

On a side-note, I just made my first GOG purchase, and now I understand why people get so enthused about the service, it’s a very simple and very ‘human’ service that really makes me feel inclined to repeat purchase without them having to resort to “try-hard” marketing tactics. Hopefully it won’t turn out that it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch or some other global capitalist Nazi type, I want to buy more Good ‘ole Games with a clear concience.

It was Fallout 2, which I (ashamedly) never got around to playing. Not very far in but I’m already enjoying it, and the GOG version runs fine on Vista (plus there’s a patch that allows you to up the resolution, on top of the unofficial bug-fix patch that I can’t remember the name of).

Next on my list is Freespace 2, another one I missed but have a feeling I’ll love, especially with the updated open-source engine project with it’s updated shiny visuals and everything.

Out of interest, does anyone know if X-wing / Tie-fighter will easily run on modern (Vista) systems?

If anyone is still wondering, I now know why not all the free games were available.

I have just gotten an email from them showing that the games will be free for only 2 days each, keeping to a schedule. It was Ishar, now it is that Nicky whatever, 30th will be Metal Mutant, May 2nd is Maya and May 4th is Transarctica.

I wonder if that is the same Metal Mutant I used to play the crap out of back on the Atari. If so, I hope they explain how to get the sodding Dragonfly to dock properly, accidentally triggering that was a pain in the arse.